BY: JESSICA BEUKER
It’s been just over a year since the first revenge porn helpline was launched in the UK. The helpline comes as a result of a strong push towards fighting revenge porn—the act of sharing explicit photos online without the victims consent.
The service, created by Laura Higgins, online safety operations manager of the Safer Internet Centre, is run by the South West Grid for Learning charity and offers support and advice. The helpline will work with police and websites to try and get non-consensual explicit photos removed from the Internet. The victims are also offered free legal advice.
Furthermore, under a new section of the Criminal Justice and Courts bill, perpetrators of revenge porn in the UK will now face prison sentences of up to two years. According to The Guardian, the bill bans the distribution of private sexual images of a person without their consent and with the intent to cause distress.
According to Broadly, since opening, the helpline has taken over 4,000 calls and managed 650 cases, some resulting in conviction. One thing the new legislation doesn’t cover, however, is photoshopped images. “About one fifth of the helpline’s clients come from these very quiet and conservative communities,” Higgins told Broadly. “And Photoshopping has moved on hugely and looks very real so the damage is very significant. With male victims, for example, it’s often male-on-male so it’s more added complication, in terms of stigma and shame.”
Another problem arises when dealing with cases where the perpetrators post or trade images without “intent to cause distress.” In those cases they cannot be prosecuted under the revenge porn legislation.
There are many misconceptions about revenge porn, the biggest being that it’s just teenagers sharing pictures of their boobs on snapchat or texting them to a guy they like, and therefore many believe that the blame rests on the victims and that “they should know better.” But Higgins explains that the issue runs much deeper, and that victim blaming is only adding insult to injury. Many of the helpline’s clients are filmed without their knowledge or forced or manipulated into it by an abusive partner.
An NSPCC study found that six out of 10 teens claim to have been asked for sexual images or videos. The study also found that most often the threat of revenge porn didn’t come from strangers but peers. The problem is therefore exacerbated, as technology enables revenge porn to spread quickly and widely as it gets passed through circles of peers.
Revenge porn is also not only directed at women, although the majority of victims are women and girls—the crime impacts men as well. And it’s not just a generational problem, as Higgins has explained that some of her clients are in their 60s. “Most of my first clients were professionals, they were not 18 year olds who went on a dating site and shared too many images. That’s what the media will tell you, but it’s not the case,” Higgins explains to Broadly. “These were people either being harassed by an ex partner—and it was clearly a domestic abuse scenario—or people who were the victims of blackmail, with perpetrators using the fact that they were in a professional role and would probably get sacked if the pictures were shared virally.”
There are hundreds of websites dedicated to the spreading of revenge porn—over 30 in the UK alone. It’s a serious issue that has not only resulted in cyberbullying and harassment but has also led to suicides of many young girls. The UK has taken a step in the right direction, to try and combat the issue and get to the root of the problem, and hopefully other places will quickly follow their lead.
